Re: Homemade email system using LuaSocket and LuaPOP3

[Dieter Plaetinck <dieter@...>]

Hi,
I just registered on this list, as I was pointed to this thread by the luakit maintainer.
Together with the maintainer of luaimap, I'm writing a mail client, which we integrate into luakit so we can benefit from luakit features such as keybindings, menu/statusbar widgets and WebkitGtk widget (all exposed with lua).  Together with existing libraries such as luaimap, this allows us to develop quite fast because so many parts are already in place.

The long story is @
http://dieter.plaetinck.be/luamail_a_mail_client_built_into_luakit.html

But the short story is, that we're building a mail client which:
1) is usable out of the box
2) offers extreme customization options (by means of lua code, allowing users to change anything)
3) provides modern features such as support for html mails with embedded content
4) is aimed for power users (extensive key binds etc)
5) provides an integrated interface (and integrated code-base), I learned some hard
lessons that using a set of different programs can make things quite
cumbersome (see my blogpost, section "Why not uzbl-style?")

We have a rough prototype working with basic IMAP functionality, and since I could not find a proper ssl/tls-supporting SMTP library, we use the msmtp program for that (which works great so far, though)
We currently focus on IMAP just because that's our preferred way of getting our mail (although we welcome contributions for local formats), currently our biggest concern is - as is mentioned here adequately - finding a good message parser.  I figure, if there is no good lua one, it's probably more sane to add lua bindings to a C/C++ based one.  There should be plenty of those around.

Dieter